Slashdot Mirror
Advertising Hits Arizona County Government Website
Combuchan writes "Just when you thought that pages on your local government's website were the last bastion of the advertisement-free WWW, that may soon change. Maricopa County (seen on slashdot before), home to 3.4 million people in the Phoenix metropolitan area, has seen their GIS website "become an every day tool for realtors, developers, mortgage and title companies, appraisers, inspectors, attorneys and many other professionals associated with the real estate industry." As a result, they are now accepting bids for Web advertisements. As the county is one of the best-run in the nation, this could set quite the precedent."
Someone's got to pay. I don't see the big deal.
How much revenue would advertising bring to the site? Would it be worth the degraded image that advertising will bring? Do they really need that extra money?
This won't help lower taxes, it will raise them. You see someone (political connected) will 'have' to be hired to managed the ad program. And since the persons salery will come out of a different budget pool they will still make it look like the ad program is bringing in more than it is.
Ain't goverment budgeting wonderful? It makes Enron's accounting look legal by comparison.
A government earning money instead of forcing its citizens to supply it under threat of force.
What on Earth will we do?!
Love it...
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
As long as my Adblock still works they can advertise all they want.
Just get AdBlock for FireFox. After a week or so of tuning it you'll almost never see an ad again.
In the beginning the universe was created. This made a lot of people very angry and is widely considered as a bad move.
Ad-Block
Yeah, right.
I'd much rather keep my money for myself to spend on the products the corporations make than contributing to the country I live in. What a horrible concept!
Unfortunately, now I won't have anyone to complain to when things start going wrong, because I'm not paying them.
I especially like this:
The same is true for his chain gangs which work six days a week contributing thousands of dollars of free labor to the community.
It's really very simple, let the public decide, and then demonstrate exactly how the revenue generated will be spent.
I would recommend that the itemized revenue be available online at any time.
no big deal.
As ads suck less, I am less inclined to block them.
I don't ever block Blogads. They're relevant almost 100% of the time.
Your standard punch the fucking monkey in the balls to win a free root canal and lobotomy combo performed by a spider from Hell banner ad is why ad blockers were invented, and their mere existence is enough to make those who purvey standard size ads unworthy of my attention, ever. In my view, nearly all standard sized advertisements (banners, skyscrapers, blah whatever) are trash and get treated like the trash they are.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
As always, ye who gives the county much needed revenue through advertising gets special treatment when you need a favor from the country should something go arwy. Same thing as cop cars with coporate advertising awhile back; if there was a protest at the local mcdonalds, and the cop cars adorn the corporate logo of mcdonalds, the cops would be there quicker to help out mcdonalds than, say, some local woman who just got raped.
I spose this is what we get for putting people in power who want government to make good business sense.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
Has anyone noticed that the site actually prevents non win98/nt/xp/me/ie4 from viewing it. It doesn't just not work it actually is prevented. It smells like discrimination to me. OF course /.ers won't think so because they acn change. But then /.ers are wrong and stupid.
Hint mod this down so I don't have excelent karma and get more mod points.
Why don't you guys have friends or journals?
Let Maricopa County have advertisers on their real estate website. That will distract people from the fact that they're buying land in the desert
Eh.. That's why I installed the AdBlock extension for Firefox. problem solved..
What is your penile percentile?
My first thought here is, what happens if the John Kerry for President campaign comes to these people and asks to buy ad space? Do they accept? Would it be ethical for them to accept? Would it be ethical for them to decline?
Isn't Arizona supposed to be one of the big contested states in the next election?
Oh, and that should be "you're".
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
But where I come from, government providing preferential treatment to businesses or individuals in exchange for monetary sums is called "corruption".
... and kick ass
.gov (we all happen to live/work in maricopa county as well)) because arc stuff is hands-down kickass
... getting esri's bundled flexlm to not crash all the time is another thing =9 (flakey e220r is the prob imo)
what's better? throw something together with grass and gmt? right
people are willing to pay (i work with gis people that work with that
now
vodka, straight up, thank you!
...it seems that few people are actually following any links before posting corporate conspiracy theories.
Now, I will admit that there's something slightly unsettling about a government giving official coverage to particular businesses. Though, as pointed out above, it may be better than taxes.
But in any event, these ads are specifically for their GIS (Geographic Information Systems) portal. That's relatively specialized stuff - people visiting it (property owners and developers) have a pretty high probability of needing some kind of service the businesses advertise there. If they don't see the ad there, they'll go to the Yellow Pages - so who do you want the money to go to, the local gov or the telecoms?
While this still strikes me as a little odd, it's not like Aunt Tilly is going to be checking a web site for the garbage pickup schedule and be confronted with flashing ambulance chaser ads or something.
If only this story hadn't leaked until they actually had advertisers. They'd probably make twice as much from the slashdot effect than from a years worth of normal use.
can't sleep. clowns will eat me.
My other job, my non-geek job, is that of firefighter. Its a volunteer "on call" community. I see the fights they have go through to replace a $50 coupling let alone a few thousand dollars of hose line.
As far as I'm concerned, if NIKE wanted to put their logo on a few hundred feed of high quality inch and three quarter line, I know a whole lot of departments that would be very very happy about it.
What to a small town fire department is a huge expense, is less than sending a sales guy to a meeting for corporate America. Think of the impact that could make.
-- ME.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
They put ads on city buses too.
... esri desktop products do kick ass... that is if you buy the "kick ass" extension for another 2,000 smackers... now their online ArcIMS products are a buggy bandaid at best =)
.mxd files and serve them up with dynamic data from a database , i'd be all over it...
but hey that's just my opinion... if there was an opensource way to take my orgs desktop
but i digress... GIS is very useful, more towns should take advantage of it... and any savings from man hours spent dealing with paper map requests at town hall, is offset by the team of IT professionals trying to keep an ESRI online mapping product up and online =)
e.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
Ads are good for covering costs, however they are also completely inappropriate for any service rendered by state authority. I'm not into US or Arizona or this particular county legislature, but if somebody would be able to promote itself on government owned web site, while somebody else couldn't, the whole thing could be seen as a governement endorsment of certain business. This in my eyes would be alost like Bush renting the White House lawn for McDonalds arches. He might be a monkey, but certain things event this monkey can't afford to do.
If the county wants to render public service, they can cover the costs with taxes or with fees. I don't expect it to be free beer, but I'm certainly disgusted by something that could be seen as a government endorsement of a particular business. If they want to put ads on it, they should spin off a privately owned company and be done with it.
How could I know the burgers were a health hazard? I've seen their advertisement on the gov. site, so I thought you checked them out... With all the lawsuits galore, this is just behind the corner.
Maybe it's just me, but government and advertising really don't mix together.
Anonymous Cowards Unite
If you think about it, anyone looking for info (say you're thinking of moving there) might appreciate some links to local real estate agents, plumbers, etc.
Obviously there's room for graft and abuse, but I'm from NJ so I guess we're used to that. (bada bing)
The revolution will NOT be televised.
Obviously, you don't know much about Phoenix history. Phoenix has been a rich place of agriculture with plenty of water to sustain multiple cultures throughout history.
The prehistoric Hohokam Indians first settled the area about 300 B.C. and dug a system of extensive irrigation canals for farming. This system included over 300 miles of major canals, which took its water from the Gila, Salt, San Pedro and Santa Cruz rivers. This water was then used to support thousands of acres of farm land. Much of Phoenix still uses the canals dug by the Hohokam.
The Phoenix area has sustained many cultures for many centuries. Phoenix has quite a few "renewable" sources of water and desert land is quite fertile and supports many crops including fruit, lettuce, cotton and hay.
Arizona produces enough cotton a year to provide at least one pair of jeans for everyone in America. Also, it is very likely that the Iceberg lettuce that you enjoy in your salad comes from Arizona. If you enjoy fruit salad, Arizona is one of the top producers of melons in the U.S.
Not to leave out the carnivores, 534.9 million pounds of beef comes from Arizona cattle per year. Getting hungry? Let's finish things of with dessert... if you have some cookies, you need milk... over 350,000 gallons are produced in AZ each year.
While it is true that Phoenix has outpaced its local resources and requires supplementary services to survive, it is far below that of much of Southern California. After all, what major metropolitan city can support itself agriculturally? I think that our neighbors in Las Vegas and Southern California are much worse off.
Just because Phoenix is in a desert, doesn't mean that it isn't naturally livable. Actually, your dire assessment of the area would lead me to conclude that the fact those of us who life there aren't dead yet, is proof enough that someone is doing something right.
Having lived in Georgia, I can say, from experience, that Maricopa County services are so much better than those of DeKalb County. The fact that my driver's license doesn't expire until I am 65 is reason enough to offer props. You have no idea how many hours I've spent waiting GA DOV lines to renew a license. In Maricopa, nearly every government service has an online component and information is only a click away: http://www.maricopa.gov/
Just my $0.02,
"Perhaps most amazingly, votaries of 'diversity' insist on absolute conformity." -- Tony Snow
Expensive, yes. Overpriced, no. ESRI's stuff is far and away the best integrated and best functioning suite of GIS tools I've used...much easier and more flexible than the tools from MapInfo, and lightyears -- milllions of them -- ahead of anything the OSS community has come up with.
As soon as something can approach the functionality and usability of ArcInfo, I will gladly agree with you. But as it stands, ESRI's stuff isn't overpriced so much as everything else is under-engineered (and it shows!)
I don't feel bad giving my money or my clients' money to ESRI...because I know that they'll quickly eat up the $500-$1000 they save buying MapInfo stuff in wasted time due to silly interfaces and buggy code. MapInfo's data management and mapping tools are excellent...their data display and map generation tools, sorely lacking.
That said...for the absolute lowest level GIS stuff (splicing together seams of an orthoimage or converting mercater projection coordinates to longitude latitude), the ESRI package is major overkill. Few of our customers will never use the really impressive features of the toolset. But it also saves them time having ME install and layer their datasets...which I can do in a quarter of the time...and my time is billed at something obscene like $150 per hour.
Hey freaks: now you're ju